A leading US healthcare company was struggling recently to recruit more nurses and stem high staff turnover. Patients were suffering, and the crisis was beginning to hit revenues.
Instead of just continuing to “firefight,” however, the company’s human-resources department responded by launching an in-depth analysis of the tenures in the group’s nursing population, noting in its study some surprising correlations between length of service, compensation, and performance.

Click here to read the full article by Frank Bafaro, Diana Ellsworth, and Neel Gandhi.

The business landscape is changing at a rapid rate, and one area that continues to evolve is individual performance management. With companies doing away with traditional methods of measuring performance, there are new practices being adopted all the time, mainly addressing the need for individuals to know who they are and manage their own performance and careers.

Much as designing customer experience has dominated the thinking of companies competing in today’s digital environment, organizations are now reexamining the employee experience. Recognizing the impact experience has on employee engagement and productivity, companies are taking a more comprehensive view of how to influence it. Our research shows that employee experience is an important and complex issue, requiring companies to evaluate the close connection between employees’ physical, social and cultural environments, as well as the tools and relationships they need to accomplish work on a daily basis.

In many organizations, human resources (HR) has been slow to integrate analytics despite its promise to transform how the function operates and the value it can contribute. Marketing provides a relevant parallel: before 2004, it was nearly impossible to track return on investment (ROI), and budgets were constricted as marketing departments became cost centers. Then something changed. Technology automation, the introduction of new skill sets (for instance, data scientists), and real-time analytics led to predictive funnel metrics and accurate ROI tracking. Budgets expanded, marketing became a profit center, and chief marketing officers started getting the top job.

Click here to read the full article by Rebecca Foreman Janjic and Brad Warga

Over and over again, organizations are unable to appoint the right leaders. According to academic estimates, the baseline for effective corporate leadership is merely 30%, while in politics, approval ratings oscillate between 25% and 40%. In America, 75% of employees report that their direct line manager is the worst part of their job, and 65% would happily take a pay cut if they could replace their boss with someone better. A recent McKinsey report suggests that fewer than 30% of organizations are able to find the right C-suite leaders, and that newly appointed executives take too long to adapt.

Click here to read the full article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Clarke Murphy

How do you get a job these days? The answer often involves networking — it isn’t what you know, it’s whom, we’re told. But what does that mean? After all, we’re connected to many people, in countless ways. So who can actually help? What kinds of relationships should we try to use when we are looking for a job?

Click here to read the full article by Ilana Gershon in the Harvard Business Review.

If you’re a business leader looking for an opportunity to have real impact on your company — and position yourself for the top job — which career path is best? CFO? COO? CMO? What if we told you that the CHRO role might be the best job you could ever have, with real opportunity for reshaping an organization? That the CHRO role, although at first it may look career limiting, can have more impact than any other position reporting to the CEO?

We assessed the early moves of CEOs with outstanding track records; some valuable lessons for leadership transitions emerged.

New CEOs face enormous challenges as they start assembling a management team and setting a strategic direction in today’s volatile environment. To provide some guidance for transitioning CEOs, we looked at the experiences of exceptional CEOs, those defined as the very top performers in our data set of roughly 600 chief executives at S&P 500 companies between 2004 and 2014.

Talent sourcing and recruitment face tremendous pressure. Talent and skill shortages are widespread. Employees are demanding new careers and career models. And technologies and innovations — including cognitive, artificial intelligence, social collaboration, crowds, and the sharing economy — are reshaping the workforce. Leading companies are turning the open talent economy into an opportunity by embracing technologies and developing new models that make innovative use of on- and off-balance-sheet talent sources.